Obama's NYC apartment on the market

7/20/12 9:45 AM EDT

The Upper West Side third-floor walk-up where Barack Obama lived while attending Columbia University in the 1980s hit the market this week. The two-bedroom prewar apartment will run you $2,400 a month, quite a jump from the $360 Obama and a roommate paid in 1981.

While the railroad-style pad, located at 142 W. 109th St., is a far cry from the palatial luxury of the White House, it has some character, according to Zak Kneider, the Citi Habitats broker listing the apartment.

"The apartment has a little charm, but other than that, it is a typical apartment," Kneider said. "Nothing is out of the ordinary except for that Obama lived here."

UPDATE at 11:04: It's the same apartment that Obama found so uncomfortable that he decided to stop paying rent until his landlord evicted him. From David Maraniss biography of Obama:

“The 109th Street experience had proved so bone-chilling that the roommates decided to flee the cheap but uncomfortable quarters after that first semester, even though they had not arranged a replacement. Long before Thanksgiving, Obama had concocted a desperate plan. Their lease was to expire on December 7, but rather than pick it up themselves (they were subletting), he suggested they let it run out, not pay the last month’s rent, and stay until they were evicted or found another place. ‘All of November we looked for another apartment, but to no avail,’ Boerner reported later in a letter to his grandmother. When phone service was cut and the heat went off for good, Boerner fled to the house of family friends in Brooklyn Heights and Obama slept on the floor at a friend’s place on the Upper East Side until he finished his exams and escaped to Los Angeles.”